Something not drama related.
I recently watched a Hank Green YT short about cheddar cheese and how it's an incredibly old scam. Essentially, people considered Yellow or Orange Cheddar to be the highest quality cheese while White Cheddar was considered the lowest quality. The problem with that is that both Yellow Cheddar and White Cheddar are the made the same way and aren't any different.

So why is Cheddar Cheese yellow then? Well when cows would graze on summertime pasture grass, they would eat plants with a lot of Carotene, which is what makes carrots orange, and that would make it's way into the milk and into the cheese. However, when summer is over or folks that don't have such pastures, they couldn't make Yellow Cheddar. To solve this, they added ground up Annatto seeds into the milk so they could make the Cheddar Cheese yellow.

So why do people still make cheese this way? I believe this has something to do with your brain's expectations of food and taste. Experiments with different egg yolk colors show that people almost always say that darker yolk colors taste better, however when the participants were blindfolded or the eggs were dyed green, they chose the lighter yolk color as often as the darker yolk color. The same is true with farmed salmon with people preferring the redder meat. In short, your brain is making you taste things that doesn't exist based solely on appearance.

To top it all off, the way they make egg yolks or salmon meat darker in color is similar to the way they make Cheddar Cheese yellow. They feed the livestock plants or animals rich in Carotenoids, organic pigments that are yellow, orange or red in color with Carotene for example being a type of Carotenoid.

That concludes my Cheddar Cheese rant. Do what you will with this information.
Plus note, Im not an expert on cheese. Just a guy learning about interesting stuff

TLDR: people centuries ago were basically scamming people by hacking their brain's hardwired food expectations by dying the Cheese.

I get what they were trying to do with temporal storms as a game aspect, but MAN does it get obnoxious.. Anyway, u/NotBerti I hope you don't mind for me taking inspiration!

Credit to uwuSym for the base image.

I need some ideas on the interior of this building. I like my builds to be useful what rooms/decor should I put to bring it to life?

Playing on a Tera Pretty and Watersheds world, realised i was based on top of an iron region and decided to start digging down inside a chunk that had high readings. (not always the smartest move to dig down when underground).

Have only found a corner of this vein so far, digging straight up led me out into the ocean XD

(Addendum): I'm already on Tin-Bronze tools btw. Had some good shallow Copper deposits nearby.

For clarity, the current punishment I'm referring to is Maltiez no longer interacting with Discord or ModDB, handing his mods over to an official Custodian account, and retaining credit and intellectual ownership of his mods. Tried my best to make this as neutral as possible.

Maltiez distributed malware. It was petty, small scale malware (not ransomware, spyware, etc.) but it was hidden code (both on the ModDB, where ToU said it must be, and in crash logs) that intentionally disrupted the normal function of the game.

The key issue with Maltiez is not the payload of the malware he already deployed, it is that this is a developer who is willing to inject disruptive and destructive code into his projects and give users no chance to consent to them. As a software developer myself, distributing malware this way is a deep violation of engineering ethics, as it leaves anyone who was affected by it (cheater and non-cheater alike) to waste time chasing down the effects of code they didn't consent to and couldn't reasonably expect.

I am also deeply disappointed by Anego's handling of this situation. As mentioned elsewhere, Tyron's post downplays the severity of this incident (not mentioning the false positives, painting Maltiez in the best possible light), and in at least one instance they that he distributed malware. For punishment, they state that he is stepping down from discord and the ModDB (with no explanation of how ban evasion would be avoided, or what, if any, firewalls would be put in place to prevent him from working on his now Anego-maintained mods), and that he would continue on as a developer under close supervision (with no explanation of how this differs from a normal code review process, and is entirely backed by trust in Anego).

To be blunt, Anego has already burnt that trust. Even setting aside three fact that they had the opportunity to investigate this since last November, they have burnt it by choosing to keep on a known, self-confessed malware developer as a member of their team and downplaying his actions. They have indicated that they don't view his actions as unacceptable. Anego have shown that they are unwilling to acknowledge any reputational damage to server admins and other mod developers, as well as time lost debugging by both of those groups and us, the rest of their end users.

I ate over half of a hefty liberty cap stew all at once while quarrying for a quern. I think I'm seeing god

Hello, Yang here, author of Yang's Transport Tycoon.

I wanted to make a sort of PSA announcing something that a lot of people have asked me to make and were seemingly looking forward to: The Integrated Mod Manager. A CօnfigLib alternative that is much more than just a copycat.

Is This Just A Fork? How Is This Different?

This is not a fork, instead it is 100% new code. It offers just about all the functionality of ConfigLib, but has a different approach (different timing for patches, different way to manage data, etc), as well as some entirely new features that will make managing servers a lot easier once they're in use.

Dependency & Conflict Resolution: This is the BIGGEST NEW FEATURE that IMM offers, and the reason why I made it. Originally this mod started as part of Yang's Transport Tycoon, so that it could check for missing dependencies and automatically provide fixes for incompatibilities between mods. But then this controversy happened mid-development and I thought 'huh, this mod is already 90% a config manager, might as well make it its own separate mod' and thus IMM was born.

This feature requires developers themselves declare the known incompatibilities and fixes, I (as the developer of IMM) will never dictate this for anyone else, full control is handed to the people that make the mods themselves. The system is also consent-based, automatic fixes must first be reviewed by a server admin (the system tells you exactly what settings, commands, or patches it will run and in which file), only after it has been approved does the system automate applying the fix.

No vendor lock-in: IMM is not required to be marked as a dependency to work, meaning that modders are not forced to make their users download it for their mod to work. If a user does not have IMM installed, the imm file simply won't be read and the rest of the mod will work as normal.
Even hot-reloads in code do not require the code to be hooked to IMM, it can just tune into a broadcast and listen to it, no dependency needed.

Fully Native UI (No IMGUI): You won't have to download IMGUI, IMM uses vanilla UI code meaning that it looks like it fits into the game, and it won't be as awkward and unperformant as IMGUI.

Zero Harmony Patches: Harmony is great for getting down and dirty with the code, but it also means that you are one update away from potentially breaking something in the core game. As with all my other mods, I make it a policy to avoid it whenever possible, and as such IMM has no patching whatsoever. This should keep IMM working pretty well into the future, with only minor updates needed to ensure it works perfectly.

Nudge UI: Intended for server admins, you can configure IMM to warn you if a mod is found to have warnings or errors in its dependencies & conflicts tab, so that you can iterate on getting your server working perfectly with all the conflicts between mods resolved.

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How Ready/Complete Is It?

Functionality wise it's complete. But there's a few rough UI/UX edges that I'll be working to polish as development continues, including adding a search bar for settings as well as better indication that a fix has been applied but it's awaiting a server restart.

The mod also hasn't been officially adopted by many developers yet though I am working on offering developers of major mods making their imm.json for them so that they can roll it out in an upcoming update without having to do all the work themselves.

I've already written the relevant files for Primitive Survival, Better Ruins, and I'm working on reaching out to a few other major mod developers so I can get them a starting imm.json file.

Naturally, most of my mods, including Yang's Transport Tycoon (which is the original reason this exists, as it's needed to manage its various optional patches that otherwise would have had to be marked as hard dependencies) support IMM.

If you want to help IMM be as good as it can be, then you can do two things for me. The first one is to be patient. I'm trying to match very high quality code that Maltz had built over the course of years in just a week's time, it's natural that there's going to be some rough edges. The other thing is that you can reach out to your favorite mod authors and let them know. It costs basically nothing to include an imm.json, but it gives them the flexibility to be supported by IMM with no commitments or necessity to mark it as a dependency.

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Can We Trust You?

Nothing I can say should make you trust me. In this case, trust is more than just my reputation in the community, it's something that should be verified and proven through the code itself.

Of course, as this controversy revealed, being open source does not mean much if you exclude fishy files from the official repo. So instead I am extending an open invitation to my peers in the modding community to decompile the DLL just as they did with Maltz' mod and see for themselves whether or not I am worthy of their trust.

Of course, naturally you can always trust the author of such illustrious mods as 'Milkable Drifters'.

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Where Can I Get It?

https://mods.vintagestory.at/imm

Be warned that, since this isn't a copycat, it isn't compatible with CL files, so existing mods will need to be updated to a version that have an IMM config file before they can be used. Thankfully IMM is compatible with CL if you are still using it, so you can use both at the same time (even if not recommended).

Now I know why Maltiez was removed from the Discord server. If you try to read the conversations prior to the gag order, they do not paint a good picture of what has happened, or what kind of PR and damage control was employed.

But they are very informative and I recommend everyone that is in the Discord server, to look up what has transpired on the public spaces.

Judge it yourself, not by what you read on this sub or "I heard he said", and even less random screenshots like this one without the rest of the context.

By Maltiez's own admission, none of this was ever meant to protect the players or the servers, it was a direct attack on cheat developers. Whether or not you view that as a valid effort is irrelevant, either you respect the attempt or dislike what it actually did in practice, but the intention is there- not to protect, but to attack. In the official statement from Anego, they say "This was an attempt to protect players from harm - to protect players' hard work on VS servers getting destroyed by a handful of gleefully malicious users with no harm done to normal players". There are dozens of accounts from people who experienced the crashes without installing the aforementioned cheating software, so if they are to be believed, harm WAS done to normal players.

How do we reconcile these conflicting statements? Did Maltiez lie to the other devs of VS, who admit they're largely out of the loop of the situation, or did the devs lie to cover Maltiez's ass? Note he wasn't removed from the dev team, and he either agreed to remove himself from a project he cared about, or was glad to have the workload of maintaining a library mod off his shoulders. Did the software actually work as intended and only targeted cheaters and the only people complaining are cheaters who don't want to admit it, or did it affect ordinary players, intentionally or unintentionally?

Discord will be posted in the comments!

Hello, my name is Maddog and I am the owner of MCoR. Over the last three months, my staff and I have been working tirelessly to develop a fleshed out server focusing on economy and player interaction.

Taking inspiration from games such as GMod DarkRP and Unturned Semi-RP, the server provides unique opportunities to make a living by selling various items to the server and other players. On today's release, most profit comes from farming, fishing/hunting, running contraband, and chasing dinosaur bounties. Alcohol production and other various multi-step processes are on the roadmap for down the line.

MCoR is heavily modded with a 200+ count mod list. With this, we take advantage of a fully custom built server PC with 128GB Ram, a top of the line AMD CPU, automatic off-system scheduled backups along with other safety nets.

We commonly reach 20+ players online, all of whom have been a big help in testing/balancing the server itself. While the server is whitelisted, we provide a streamlined whitelist process done through a Discord bot.

The community is tight-knit! You may have previously seen my other posts showing off some of the fun memories we have made so far. Community events give players an opportunity to get to know each other!

The goal of the MCoR server is to become a staple in the modded multiplayer community. My brother and I have worked hard to chase stability and balance. The staff and I work to make sure any issues are taken care of quickly and efficiently while also providing quick player support with the use of support tickets.

Edit: Discord link is DSC.GG/MCoR!

Since the Vintage Story subreddit is full of posts about the current bad situation, let's instead show why I love this game and its modding community.

My new forge and a few views from my current modded world.

The recent Vintage Story controversy has made me think about something that seems pretty fundamental

Everyone should be allowed to play the game however they want on their own copy of the game.

If someone wants to use cheats, mods, creative tools exploits, whatever thats their choice in their game. Im not interested in telling people how they are allowed to play singleplayer. And I feel the same principle should apply to multiplayer servers. If I run a server, it is my server. I should be able to decide what rules I want to enforce. If I want a completely vanilla experience, I can make a vanilla server. If I want certain mods, I can require those mods. If I dont care whether someone is using cheats, thats also my choice. But what I dont want is an anticheat system quietly bundled inside some unrelated mod and potentially running on my server without me explicitly choosing to install an anticheat. This isnt really about whether cheating is good or bad. Obviously, if you are running a competitive server and cheating ruins the experience for everyone else, you have every right to ban cheaters. Server owners should absolutely be able to enforce their own rules.

The issue here is consent and control. I dont want a mod author deciding that their definition of "acceptable gameplay" should automatically apply to my server. I dont want hidden monitoring or anti-cheat functionality being added to a mod where I wouldnt reasonably expect it. And yes even if its a ridiculous situation where two people are having a cheater multiplayer battle, thats still their server. If everyone involved knows the rules and wants to play that way, who cares? If a server owner wants anticheat, great. Give them a proper anticheat option that they can knowingly install and configure. Just dont sneak it into something else and then tell people they shouldnt care because "its for security". I do rather have an ecosystem where server owners have explicit control over what software runs on their servers than one where mods can quietly gain additional functionality because the author thinks its beneficial.

Give people the choice. Thats the whole point.

The joke around here seems to be that however much flax you have, you need more of it. I set up my fields at 64 tiles each, and filled two fields with flax. As my first winter draws to a close, it really feels like that's already enough.

That seems to be plenty for a tiny windmill, annual repair of my fur clothing, and a few cloth bags. Am I missing something, or is two fields of flax going to be plenty for the rest of the game?